‘Dialogue Works’ edition of 24 December

Uncategorized 1 Minute

This chat with host Nima Alkhorshid covered several important developments in the past week with respect to Russia’s relations with Slovakia, Zelensky’s slush fund for bribing Western politicians and the latest thinking in Moscow about the chances for reaching some accommodation with Donald Trump.

As I mention in this discussion, Russian thinking about Trump has rocked back and forth over the past month. Trump’s list of nominees for the ‘power ministries’ in his new administration aroused consternation in Moscow, since they are nearly all Neocon in outlook. The chattering classes were all saying that there is no need to show restraint and wait patiently for the Trump inauguration, because nothing good will come out his administration.  Trump’s statements on the war, his insistence that Russian losses are six times greater than Ukrainian losses, confirmed the conviction in Moscow that Trump is receiving the same worthless intelligence reporting as Biden received and will reach the same conclusions about the need to continue to provide arms and money to Ukraine after he takes office. However, Trump’s most recent statements in the past week largely swept away skepticism about him. The key point was Trump’s declaring that the decision to authorize use of American ATACMS and HIMARS missiles by Ukraine to strike deep into the Russian heartland was ‘foolish and very dangerous.’ This persuaded Russian elites, and likely the Kremlin as well, that Trump may have a realistic understanding of the seriousness of Russian resolve and of its military capabilities, all of which augurs well for reaching some accommodation with the USA to end the war on acceptable terms.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaZjg5pvQ8U

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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